Business intelligence applications

Introduction:

This term paper is about software known as SAP software used in marketing to share networks so that the products could be easily distributed with proper record in several parts. Some well-known techniques such as cloud computing are used in it.

HISTORY

SAP, started in 1972 by five former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany, states that it is the world's third-largest independent software vendor. The original name for SAP was German: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte. It means "Systems Applications and Products." The goal of the company was to provide large enterprise customers with the ability to interact with a corporate database in real-time. Today, the company states that its goal is "to offer the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of business performance and optimization solutions for companies of all sizes."

SAP's first software application was a financial accounting software suite that ran on amainframe and was known for its stability. It eventually became known as the R/1 system. The "R" stands forreal-time. During the 1980s, the company went international, and the second iteration of the R system (R/2) accommodated different languages and currencies. In the 1990s, the third iteration (R/3) moved from the mainframe to aclient/server three-tier architecture composed of adatabase, software applications and a common graphical user interface (GUI). SAP used the name R/3 until the 5.0 release. At that time the name was changed from R/version to ERP Central Component (ECC). The most current version as of November 2009 is ECC 6.0.

SAP Business Suite - Software applications for large organizations and international corporations. The applications support core business operations such as supply chain management, warehouse management, sales, customer relationship management and administrative functions. SAP offers software for 25 vertical industries, including banking, insurance, chemicals, and healthcare, retail and consumer products.

SAP Business All-in-One solutions, SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One - Software products that address the needs of small and mid-market companies.

WORKING WITH BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS

Business Intelligence applications (BI applications) enable portal users to evaluate and analyze current and historical company data at various levels of detail and from different viewpoints.

BI application----Application that displays the relevant business data to the employees of a company, particularly members of management. The data can be produced as formatted reports or as analytical applications that allow detailed data analysis.

iView ------ Program that retrieves data from content sources within your company (such as from the BI system) or from the Internet, and displays the data in the content area of the portal.

Portal role ----- A role defined in the portal. A role is a collection of tasks, services, and information available to groups of users. The role determines which services can be accessed. The role also provides the visualization of the content and the navigation structure.

KM folder ---- Container for documents and folders in Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management enables unstructured information from various sources in the portal to be integrated, provided in an organized way, and managed uniformly.

Collaboration Room ---Portal-based room that enables users to organize themselves in teams and projects regardless of their physical location.

It supports teamwork through shared use of project-related applications and information that only room members have access to. If required, you can publish information gathered or created for public access.

Customer relationship management

No matter how hard you work, you can't succeed in the small-business world if you don't put your customers first. But making the most of customer relationships isn't easy. Keeping your clientele engaged and coming back for more requires flexibility, a great memory, and creative thinking. Today, customer relationship management (CRM) software is a must-have for companies that want to keep in touch with their clients. And for very small companies, the most compelling CRM products live in the cloud. So, to understand the concept of customer relationship management, we need to understand the pros and cons of cloud computing.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service. The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet inflowcharts and diagrams.

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.

Working of cloud computing

Let's say a person is an executive of a large corporation. His particular responsibilities include making sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buyingcomputersfor everyone isn't enough -- he also have to purchase software orsoftware licensesto give employees the tools they require. Whenever he have a new hire, he have to buy more software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It's so stressful that you find it difficult to go tosleepon your huge pile of money every night.

Soon, there may be an alternative for executives like you. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything frome-mailto word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's calledcloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry.

In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

The on-demand, self-service, pay-by-use model

The on-demand, self-service, pay-by-use nature of cloud computing is also an extension of established trends. From an enterprise perspective, the on-demand nature of cloud computing helps to support the performance and capacity aspects of service-level objectives. The self-service nature of cloud computing allows organizations to create elastic environments that expand and contract based on the workload and target performance parameters. And the pay-by-use nature of cloud computing may take the form of equipment leases that guarantee a minimum level of service from a cloud provider.

Virtualization is a key feature of this model. IT organizations have understood for years that virtualization allows them to quickly and easily create copies of existing environments sometimes involving multiple virtual machines to support test, development, and staging activities. The cost of these environments is minimal because they can coexist on the same servers as production environments because they use few resources. Likewise, new applications can be developed and deployed in new virtual machines on existing servers, opened up for use on the Internet, and scaled if the application is successful in the marketplace. This lightweight deployment model has already led to a "Darwinistic" approach to business development where beta versions of software are made public and the market decides which applications deserve to be scaled and developed further or quietly retired. Cloud computing extends this trend through automation. Instead of negotiating with an IT organization for resources on which to deploy an application, a compute cloud is a self-service proposition where a credit card can purchase compute cycles and a Web interface or API is used to create virtual machines and establish network relationships between them. Instead of requiring a long-term contract for services with an IT organization or a service provider, clouds work on a pay-by-use, or pay-by-the-sip model where an application may exist to run a job for a few minutes or hours, or it may exist to provide services to customers on a long-term basis. Compute clouds are built as if applications are temporary, and billing is based on resource consumption: CPU hours used, volumes of data moved, or gigabytes of data stored. The ability to use and pay for only the resources used shifts the risk of how much infrastructure to purchase from the organization developing the application to the cloud provider. It also shifts the responsibility for architectural decisions from application architects to developers. This shift can increase risk, risk that must be managed by enterprises that have processes in place for a reason, and of system, network, and storage architects that needs to factor in to cloud computing designs.

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